James Strachan has posted the first beta of Groovy 1.0, an open source, dynamically typed high level scripting language for the Java virtual machine. Features include:
I really have to wonder about the judgement of including operator overloading. I think C++ has proved pretty conclusively by example that is a bad idea. They're about a dozen textbook cases where it makes sense, all mathematical, and then you find yourself trying to debug code where someone is adding two database recorrds together. They're just aren't enough real uses of the various operators to make operator overloading worth its cose in complexity and code legibility. Otherwise it looks interesting. I've never succeeded in getting jython running, and a dynamically typed scripting language for the Java virtual machine could be a very useful tool. Groovy is published under a BSD license. Java 1.4 is required.